“And then Vernon Dahmer was killed in sixty-six. He was Forrest County NAACP president. Got his house firebombed, his wife and eight kids inside. His wife got herself and all the kids out. Dahmer manages to escape, but he’s so badly burned he doesn’t make it. He dies the next day. That was one time people actually demanded a real honest-to-God investigation, and they ended up indicting fourteen men. Thirteen made it to trial, eight of them on arson and murder charges, the rest on conspiracy to intimidate and such. They even charged Sam Bowers, Imperial Wizard, got him before a judge and jury four times, but each time it ended in a mistrial. All that happened on my doorstep, literally, and it was the kind of thing that really soured a lot of people on Klan membership. They certainly were not in the business of making any new friends down here, and they lost a lot of old ones. Late sixties was when Earl Wade started to get sick, and since then, he’s not been physically well enough to be involved in anything like that.”

“He’s sick?” Gaines asked. “Sick with what?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Ross said. “Maybe he’s just getting old. Heard word he was losing his mind, going senile, you know?”

“But Matthias,” Holland said, “well, he’s a different animal altogether.”

“He’s active in the Klan?” Gaines asked.

“Who the hell knows,” Ross replied. “It isn’t something people openly admit to anymore. Back in the twenties, the Klan had something in the region of four or five million members, some say as high as six million. That was about five percent of the population. One person in every twenty was a self-professed Klan member.”

“Well, we know for sure he had a major disagreement with his sister and Clifton Regis getting together.”

“And Regis is on a three-to-five, you say?”

“Right.”

“And he’s been there how long?”

“Seventeen months.”

“You want me to check into it?” Ross asked. “I still have a whole network of friends and acquaintances in the legal arena. Hattiesburg, Vicksburg, Jackson, Columbus, Tupelo . . . I can find out who was on it, the judge, jury selection, all kinds of things.”

“No,” Gaines said. “I have enough going on without worrying about whether or not Clifton Regis was set up by Matthias Wade. Right now, all I am interested in is Michael Webster’s death.”

“And Nancy Denton’s,” Holland said.

“No, not as much, Eddie. Webster was killed less than a week ago, Nancy twenty years ago. I think that Matthias Wade killed Nancy. I think he strangled her and dumped the body. I think Michael Webster found her, and then he did what he did. He held on to that secret for twenty years with the deluded belief that she might come back. That’s why he never spoke of it, and I think Wade knew he would never speak of it. If he spoke of what had happened, then not only would this revival be compromised, but he would go to jail for what he did to her body, for obstructing justice, and might even have been found guilty of her murder. When she was found, well, everything changed. Then Webster would be free to speak, certain that she wasn’t coming back. Wade knew that Webster had to be removed from the equation, and removed he was. If Webster did kill Nancy, well, there isn’t anything more the law can do to him now. If Matthias killed Nancy, then even getting him for Michael Webster’s murder will serve me well enough.”

“And you honestly think that Della is your inside line to that family?” Ross asked.

“I have to try something, Nate. And right now, it’s the best thing I can think of.”

“And you’re off to Gulfport tomorrow morning?” Holland asked.

“Yes.”

“You want me to come with you? Maryanne knows me. She trusts me. It might make the difference between her being willing to cooperate or not.”

“Yes, that’d be really appreciated.”

“Then I’ll be ready tomorrow morning,” Holland said.

“I’ll come fetch you at eight.”

“So now there’s no reason not to stay and have a drink,” Ross said. “Better here with company than home on your own, right?”

Gaines considered the cold and empty house, the closed door of his mother’s room, the task that that lay ahead of him, of how he would cope with everything that reminded him of her. He thought of her clothes, her picture albums, her personal possessions.

“Okay,” Gaines said. “One drink, a few hands of poker.”

“Or a few drinks and one hand of poker,” Ross said. “Sounds better that way.”

49

Gaines did not leave Ross’s house until somewhere close to one a.m. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow, and yet woke suddenly a little more than five hours later.

He paid no mind to that long-familiar sense of bone-deep fatigue. In-country, he had sleepwalked through days, never catching more than an hour or two’s rest at a time. He showered, shaved, got dressed, made some coffee, and then drove over to the office. Neither Barbara nor Hagen had arrived, and he appreciated the silence and solitude.

The thought he had woken with, right there at the forefront of his mind, was Michael Webster’s photo album, still there in evidence lockup.

He retrieved the album and took it to reception, sat there at the front desk to save having to walk back out every time the phone rang, and he went through it.

Gaines studied each picture carefully, now recognizing both Maryanne Benedict and Matthias Wade without hesitation. And Nancy was there, just as before, always smiling, so full of life. The way in which she seemed to radiate from those simple, faded images was inexplicable. Maryanne was beautiful, too, undeniably, but it was after three or four pages that he recognized yet another girl. She looked a little younger than Maryanne and he suspected this was Della Wade. There was something in the eyes that reminded Gaines of Matthias, but where Matthias possessed a degree of distance, perhaps even coolness, the young Della Wade was afire with vitality and happiness, much the same as Nancy. Possibly Matthias’s seeming lack of warmth was due to Webster’s presence, the resentment Matthias must have felt as he saw the closeness Webster and Nancy shared. His bitterness would have been directed toward Webster at first, and then perhaps—finally—Nancy herself. Had Matthias killed Nancy to satiate something so petty as spite and jealousy? If I can’t have her, neither can you. Had that been the motivation? It made sense. Love became soured by rejection, and eventually that sense of rejection, festering among unexpressed thoughts and unrequited hopes, had become bitter and twisted. Finally, Matthias had convinced himself that Nancy was foolish or stupid or ignorant, that someone who would deny him what was rightfully his had no place on this earth. Or perhaps it was simply that he could not bear to be reminded of his loss every day, and the only way to remove that reminder was to remove the person he’d lost.

But Della was there, appearing time and again through some of the later images. She could only have been ten or eleven years old. Had she and Maryanne been close? Would this gamble pay off? Would Della still hold enough feelings of affection toward Maryanne for Maryanne to get to her?

Perhaps nothing more would be served by this venture than the ultimate reunion of Clifton Regis and Della Wade. And all of this was dependent upon the validity of what Clifton Regis had told him. There was always the possibility that Della Wade was as manipulative as Gaines believed Matthias to be, that she had used Regis as a means by which she could escape the clutches of the Wade family. Gaines didn’t believe so. He had seen something in Clifton Regis’s eyes, and he had believed the man. And good though it would be to help Regis and Della with their personal lives, Gaines was hoping for so much more. He needed a foot in the door. He needed something that would give him leverage on Matthias Wade.